To start right (and avoid a lot of frustration between you and your listeners), assign a reporter or editor who can oversee the reporting process, from user submissions, to edits, to pitches, to new assignments to the finished product. That might sound like a tall order to a busy news station with daily events to cover, but the benefit of gathering many voices on a single topic is a richer, deeper story. It engages your audience in providing content, expertise and unique ideas in a worthy collaboration.
What WNYC did:
When The Brian Lehrer Show decided that we wanted to tell uncommon economic stories, it was obvious that we couldn’t find them all ourselves. We decided to go to our crowd, and gave them multiple ways to share what they spotted, no matter where they were located. Their options: text, phone, video and photo. By creating a set of web tools* for them to use spontaneously, we were ready for just about any unique stuff they could find. Listeners found it appealing to have a way to share with us and our audience any of the unusual things they noticed that they were sure resulted from the Recession.
Why Employ Web Tools?
Here’s an example of what happened when a WNYC reporter inadvertently crowdsourced “a few parents” by email to see if she could get more information on a story. She wrote this message to the news team after she went through what felt like a tidal wave of response:
There’s this big issue in the news having to do with overcrowding in kindergarten classes. We’ve done newscasts items on it and there’s a rally today at City Hall that I’m going to cover.
This issue is very complicated – it has to do with school construction, demographics, how it impacts particular schools.
I took the latest figures the city’s Dept of Education sent to reporters today, breaking down which schools have waiting lists, and I wrote a blog post for those who want to know the most minute details. But I also used the post to explain the bigger picture. I then sent a link to the post to a couple of active parents so I could get their feedback. I’ll be interviewing someone from the DOE later today about the topic and thought I could use some specific examples to mention in my questions.
Well, one of the parents I contacted then sent my blogpost to dozens of other parents on her list. I was soon getting more feedback than I bargained for and had to basically tell her “call off the dogs!”
Bottom line: It worked. But be careful what you wish for!
What says “Hot Button Issue” better than parents vs. schools? This reporter didn’t expect the parents she contacted to forward her email to their distribution lists across the city. The response she got was intense, because of the topic, and immediate because of the ease of sending the reporter a direct message.
What would have improved the reporter’s experience is a website tool for a listener to deposit information online. If a station can capture data (the reaction, an email address, a geo-location, demographic, etc.,) on the back end, reporters can then cull useful information, follow up on new ledes and build stronger bonds with people who come to them with insight.
See how we managed a crowdsourcing project at WNYC that resulted in over one thousand responses to our question: Show us the Economy in Your Neighborhood. Case Study: A Way to Gather and Display Data
*Here is a sketch of the web tool WNYC is working on to help reporters with this process:
